Roy Campbell:

An Inventory of His Collection at the Harry Ransom Center

Creator:

Campbell, Roy, 1901-1957

Title:

Roy Campbell Collection

Dates:

1920-1987 (bulk 1942-1957)

Extent:

4 document boxes (1.68 linear feet), 1 galley file (gf)

Abstract:

The Ransom Center's collection of Roy
Campbell spans the years 1920 to 1987 and includes drafts of poems, prose works,
and
translations, as well as family and other correspondence. Also present are
biographical and bibliographical material, including published reviews and criticism
and a few photographs.

Roy Campbell was born at Durban, Natal, on October 2, 1901, to Dr. Samuel G. and
Margaret Campbell, the father African-born of Ulster Scots stock, the mother a
Scot.
Roy grew up in the rough-hewn setting of colonial Natal, displaying an early
affinity for creative writing and an active outdoor life. Sent to Britain to attend
Oxford at the end of World War I, he failed his entrance exams, but defended himself
by explaining to his father that "university lectures
interfere very much with my work."

Campbell plunged into a bohemian literary life, acquiring literary friends including
William Walton, the Sitwells, and Wyndham Lewis. He met and married (in 1922)
Mary
Margaret Garman, a young beauty no less independent-minded than himself; they
soon
became the parents of daughters Teresa (Tess) and Anna. His first substantial
work,
a poem entitled The Flaming Terrapin, was written in
the loft of a Welsh cowshed early in the couple's marriage and published in 1924.

In 1925, Campbell returned to Durban to help found the journal Voorslag as a vehicle to help rid southern Africa of what he saw as its
smug and parochial world view. This effort failed, and upon his return to England
Roy Campbell published The Wayzgoose, a South African
Satire. The Wayzgoose did little for
Campbell's reputation, but his following collection of poems, Adamastor, published by Faber, was well received critically.

By the end of the 1920s, Campbell's attitude toward Bloomsbury and the British
intelligentsia in general had grown increasingly critical, and in 1931, after
publishing The Georgiad, an anti-Bloomsbury poetic
diatribe, Roy and Mary Campbell left England for the Mediterranean, settling first
in Provence and by 1935 in Spain, where they were received into the Catholic Church.

The Campbells were living in Toledo, Spain, when the Spanish Civil War erupted in
the
summer of 1936, and Roy's witnessing the murder of Catholic priests and nuns at
the
hands of militiamen of the Spanish Republic provoked the final break between Roy
Campbell and conventional British literary leftism. Campbell became ever more
outspoken on behalf of Francisco Franco and the cause of the rebelling Spanish
Nationalists, and in February 1939 published Flowering
Rifle, a book-length poem filled with praise of Franco and condemnation of
the Spanish Republic.

When World War II broke out in September 1939, Campbell denounced Adolf Hitler and
Nazi Germany and returned with his family to Britain. After serving for a time
as an
air raid warden Roy Campbell was able to enlist in the British army despite his
age
and physical condition. A lengthy period spent shuttling between army camps in
Wales
and Scotland finally ended when he was sent to East Africa in 1943, only to be
invalided out of the service in April 1944.

Campbell returned to England and worked as a government clerk before being offered
employment by the British Broadcasting Corporation at the end of the war. In the
late 1940s and into the 1950s, Campbell was a producer for the BBC before moving
one
final time to Sintra, Portugal. While Campbell had found Franco's ties to Nazi
Germany in the late 1930s increasingly distasteful the authoritarian Salazar regime
ruling Portugal at mid-century was to him endurable.

In his final years Campbell turned more and more to literary translation, producing
English versions of The Poems of St. John of the
Cross (1951), Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal
(1952), and two novels of Antonio d'Eça de Queiroz (Cousin Basilio in 1952, The City and the
Mountains in 1955). In 1951, he published his second volume of
autobiography, Light on a Dark Horse, later finding
time for a North American lecture tour in 1953 and a 1954 visit to South Africa
to
receive an honorary doctorate from the University of Natal.

Roy Campbell died on April 23, 1957, in an automobile accident near Setúbal,
Portugal, while returning to Sintra from Toledo after attending Holy Week ceremonies
in Seville.

The Ransom Center's collection of Roy Campbell spans the years 1920 to 1987 and
includes drafts of poems, prose works, and translations, as well as family and
other
correspondence. Also present are biographical and bibliographical material,
including published reviews and criticism and a few photographs. The collection
is
based on acquisitions from the collections of T. E. Hanley and Ellsworth and Joan
Mason, along with portions of the papers of Uys Krige and the Campbell family.
The
collection, as arranged at the Ransom Center, is in three series: I. Works,
1931-1957 (2 boxes); II. Correspondence, 1920-1987 (1 box); and III. Biographical
and Critical Materials, 1933-1979 (1 box).

The Works series contains, in the main, projects Roy Campbell worked on the last half
decade of his life while living in Sintra, Portugal. Translations of Horace's
Ars Poetica and Federico García Lorca's La Casa de Bernarda Alba--neither yet published--are
found here, along with Campbell's published versions of The
Poems of St. John of the Cross and Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal. A partial manuscript of the critical work Lorca, along with the unpublished Taurine Epistles are
also present.

Drafts--often multiple drafts--of poems written in Campbells's years in Portugal are
primarily contained in the 35 exercise books found under the headings "Manuscript notebooks" and "Notebooks." Of this group, only manuscript notebook 30 appears to date
from the years before the Second World War.

The largest part of the Correspondence series is Roy Campbell's letters to his wife.
The earliest piece of this correspondence dates from 1924, but the bulk of the
letters were written during the war years when Campbell was stationed at various
army camps in Great Britain and later in East Africa. There are also smaller groups
addressed to Campbell's mother and to his eldest daughter Teresa.

Literary correspondence is not prominent in the collection, but letters written by
Wyndham Lewis, Alan Paton, and Edith Sitwell are found in Campbell's incoming
correspondence and in the Third Party correspondence. The Third Party correspondence
also includes letters between Teresa Campbell and Ellsworth Mason dealing with
the
sale of materials relating to Roy Campbell. The Campbell-Mason correspondence
also
includes biographical notes on the Campbell family supplied by Teresa, her sister
Anna, and Anna's husband Rob Lyle.

The Bibliographical and Critical Materials series is dominated by several drafts of
articles about Roy Campbell written by his friend Uys Krige between the early
1930s
and 1958. The earliest of these date from Krige's first meeting with Campbell
in the
south of France in October 1932 and conclude with two pieces dating from shortly
after the poet's 1957 death. Also found here are a number of bibliographies and
reviews from the Ellsworth and Joan Mason collection of Roy Campbell.

Note: Following the Index of Correspondents there is additionally an Index of Titles
and First Lines. While this latter index is not exhaustive, it was believed that
it
would help give a better idea of the contents of the exercise books which comprise
a
large part of this collection. Many of the poems, essays, and other works by
Campbell found here in draft form are perhaps not well known nor yet, in many
cases,
published.

The Art Collection holds, in the Olaf de Wet collection, a portrait head of Campbell
of painted plaster; in the Photography Collection are photographs of Roy and Mary
Campbell and their family, as well as of places associated with them.